Quotes About Friends

Quotes About Friends – the definition of a friend, according to Webster’s, is “a person who you like and enjoy being with.” But what is the true meaning of friendship? What is a true friend? What’s it mean to be a best friend?

Through the quotes below, you’ll learn different perspectives on friends, friendship, and the qualities of a friend.

Good Quotes About Friends

Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends, even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.
Thomas Aquinas

When men are friends, there is no need of justice; but when they are just, they still need friendship.
Aristotle

Quotes About Friends.

A principal fruit of friendship is the use and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce.
Bacon

There is possible today, as ever, a generous friendship which forgets self… The miracle of friendship has been too often enacted on this dull earth of ours to suffer us to doubt either its possibility or its wondrous beauty.
Hugh Black

Most of our friendships lack the distinction of greatness because we are not ready for little acts of service.
Hugh Black

Friends are to incite one another to God’s works.
William Ellery Channing

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.
Francis Bacon

You might like: 101 Funny Friendship Messages and Texts

Short Quotes About Friends

Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.
Anita Brookner

Wherever we are, it is our friends that make our world.
Henry Drummond

My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.
Henry Ford

Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them.
Francesco Guicciardini

When a friend is in trouble, don’t annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.
Edgar Watson Howe

A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.
Elbert Green Hubbard

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them.
Emerson

Friendship is like a debt of honor; the moment it is talked of, it loses its real name and assumes the more ungrateful form of obligation.
Goldsmith

Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals.
Goldsmith

See Thinking of You Message Ideas for Friends

True Friends Quotes

True friendship’s laws are by this rule express’d, Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.
Homer

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is the ability to do without it. To be capable of that high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two before there can be very one.
Emerson

Now can there be a worse disgrace than this—that I should be thought to value money more than the life of a friend?
Plato

Have friends, not for the sake of receiving, but of giving.
Joseph Roux

The services which cement friendship are reciprocal services.
William Smith

Amongst true friends, there is no fear of losing anything.
Jeremy Taylor

No friendship can excuse a sin.
Jeremy Taylor

True friends visit us in prosperity only when invited, but in adversity, they come without invitation.
Theophrastus

Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.
Tennyson

Friendship is to be purchased only by friendship. A man must have authority over others, but he can never have their heart but by giving his own.
Thomas Wilson

Friendship Quotations

He who will not to friends’ advice attend; Must not complain when they reprehend.
Saadi

There is no such flatterer as is a man’s self, and there is no such remedy against flattery of a man’s self as the liberty of a friend.
Bacon

Let flattery, however, the bond-maid of vices, be far removed from friendship, since it is not only unworthy of a friend, but of a free man.
Cicero

How was friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the Good and True: otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league.

A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man.
Carlyle

A real friend is one who will tell you of your faults and follies in prosperity, and assist you with his hand and heart in adversity.
Horace Smith

Inspirational Quotes About Friends

There be three sorts of friends: the first is like a torch we meet in a dark street; the second is like a candle in a lanthorn that we overtake; the third is like a link that offers itself to the stumbling passenger. The met torch is the sweet-lipped friend, which lends us a flash of compliment for the time, but quickly leaves us to our former darkness.

The over-taken lanthorn is the true friend, which, though it promises but a faint light, yet it goes along with us as far as it can to our journey’s end. The offered link is the mercenary friend, which though it be ready enough to do us service, yet that service hath a servile relation to our bounty.
Quarles

That which is most beneficial is also most excellent, and therefore those friendships must need be most perfect where the friends can be most useful.
Jeremy Taylor

Quotes About Friends: Importance of Friendship in Life

I would not live without the love of my friends.
Keats

Every man has frequent grievances which only the solicitude of friendship will discover and remedy, and which would remain forever unheeded in the mighty heap of human calamity, were it only surveyed by the eye of general benevolence equally attractive to every misery.
Samuel Johnson

There is no man that imparteth his joys to his friend, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his griefs to his friend, but he grieveth the less.
Bacon

Friendship? two bodies and one soul.
Joseph Roux

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.
George Eliot

We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, eat together:
And wheresoe’er we went like Juno’s swans,
Still, we went coupled, and inseparable.
Shakespeare

Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles; have no friends not equal to yourself.
Confucius

Old friends are the best. King James used to call for his old shoes. They were easiest for his feet.
John Selden

Quotes About Friends: What Friendship is all about

Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.
Emerson

A generous friendship no cold medium knows,
Burns with one love, with one resentment glows,
One should our interests and our passions be,
My friend must hate the man that injures me.
Pope

Keep thy friend under thy own life’s key.
Shakespeare

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
John xv. 13

The friendship of the pure-minded, whether in presence or absence, is not such that they will find fault with thee behind thy back, and die for thee in thy presence.
SaadiYes, we must ever be friends; and of all who offer you friendship
Let me be ever the first, the truest, the nearest and dearest!
Longfellow

Friendship like love is but a name,
Unless to one you stint the flame.
The child, whom many fathers share,
Hath seldom known a father’s care.
‘Tis thus in friendships; who depend
On many, rarely find a friend.
Gay

When two friends part, they should lock up each other’s secrets and exchange keys.
Unknown

Best Quotes on Friendship

Life is to be fortified by many friendships.
To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.
Sydney Smith

The joy that comes from a true communion of heart with another is perhaps one of the purest and greatest in the world.
Hugh Black

Stay is a charming word in a friend’s vocabulary.
Bronson Alcott

When I see leaves drop from their trees in the beginning of autumn, just such, think I, is the friendship of the world. Whilst the sap of maintenance lasts, my friends swarm in abundance; but in the winter of my need, they leave me naked. He is a happy man that hath a true friend at his need, but he is more truly happy that hath no need of his friend.
Warwick

As the yellow gold is tried in the fire, so the faith of friendship must be seen in adversity.
Ovid

True friendship, like a star, is made brilliant by the dark night.
Unknown

That friendship only is genuine when two friends, without speaking a word to each other, can, nevertheless, find happiness in being together.
George Ebers

Promises may get friends, but it is the performance that must nurse and keep them.
Owen Feltham

More Great Quotes on Friendship

He is a friend who, in dubious circumstances, aids in deeds when deeds are necessary.
Plautus

In friendship, your heart is like a bell struck every time your friend is in trouble.
Henry Ward Beecher

Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep by a word or a look his real sympathy.
Emerson

The vital air of friendship is composed of confidence.
Joseph Roux

Who is not ready to acknowledge that friendship is the delight of youth, the pillar of age, the bloom of prosperity, the charm of solitude, the solace of adversity, the best benefactor and comforter in this vale of tears?
Unknown

However well proved a friendship may appear, there are confidences which it should not hear, and sacrifices which should not be required of it.
Joseph Roux

Don’t flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Meaning of Friendship Quotes

Keep your undrest, familiar style for strangers, but respect your friend.
Coventry Patmore

It is good discretion not to make too much of any man at first because one cannot hold out that proportion.
Bacon

When an enemy has tried every expedient in vain, he will pretend friendship, and then, by this pretext, execute designs which no enemy could have effected.
Saadi

Worldly friendship is profuse in honeyed words, passionate endearments, commendations of beauty, while true friendship speaks a simple honest language.
Francis de Sales

Ceremony and great professing renders friendship as much suspected as it does religion.
Wycherley

A friend should be like money—tried before being required, not found faulty in our need.
Plutarch

He is our friend who loves more than admires us and would aid us in our great work.
William Ellery Channing

Know this, that he that is a friend to himself, is a friend to all men.
Seneca

What it Means to Be a Friend

A friend is he who sets his heart upon us, is happy with us, and delights in us; does for us what we want, is willing and fully engaged to do all he can for us, on whom we can rely in all cases.
William Ellery Channing

There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself; we cannot force it any more than love.
Hazlitt

If thou wouldst get a friend, prove him first, and be not hasty to credit him. For some man is a friend for his own occasion, and will not abide in the day of trouble.
Ecclesiasticus

Costly followers are not to be liked; lest while a man maketh his train longer, he maketh his wings shorter.
Bacon

Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.
George Eliot (for more funny friend quotes)

Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant truths from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Mates

A true friend will appear such in leaving us to act according to our intimate conviction,—will cherish this nobleness of sentiment, will never wish to substitute his power for our own.
William Ellery Channing

The man who prefers his dearest friend to the call of duty will soon show that he prefers himself to his dearest friend.
W. Robertson

Give not thy friend so much power that if one day he should become a foe, thou mayst not be able to resist him.
Saadi

If you could keep your friend, approach him with a telescope, never with the microscope.
Unknown

By Liz Olson

Liz is a writer who lives in Minneapolis.

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